cerning the liquor called coffee which is
drank in company, as being reckoned in the number of those we have
free leave to make use of, notwithstanding it is the cause of no
small disorders, that it flies up into the head and is very
pernicious to health? Is it permitted or forbidden?

At the end he was careful to add, as his own opinion (and without
prejudice?), that coffee was unlawful. To the credit of the physicians
of Cairo as a class, it should be recorded that they looked with
unsympathetic eyes upon this attempt on the part of one of their number
to stir up trouble for a valuable adjunct to their materia medica, and
so the effort died a-borning.

If the physicians were disposed to do nothing to stop coffee's progress,
not so the preachers. As places of resort, the coffee houses exercised
an appeal that proved stronger to the popular mind than that of the
temples of worship. This to men of sound religious training was
intolerable. The feeling against coffee smouldered for a time; but in
1534 it broke out afresh. In that year a fiery preacher in one of
Cairo's mosques so played upon the emotions of his congregation with a
preachment against coffee, claiming that it was against the law and that
those who drank it were not true Mohammedans, that upon leaving the
building a large number of his hearers, enraged, threw themselves into
the first coffee house they found in their way, burned the coffee pots
and dishes, and maltreated all the persons they found there.

Public opinion was immediately aroused; and the city was divided into
two parties; one maintaining that coffee was against the law of
Mohammed, and the other taking the contrary view. And then arose a
Solomon in the person of the chief justice, who summoned into his
presence the learned physicians for consultation. Again the medical
profession stood by its guns. The medical men pointed out to the chief
justice that the question had already been decided by their predecessors
on the side of coffee, and that the time had come to put some check "on
the furious zeal of the bigots" and the "indiscretions of ignorant
preachers." Whereupon, the wise judge caused coffee to be served to the
whole company and drank some himself. By this act he "re-united the
contending parties, and brought coffee into greater esteem than ever."

_Coffee in Constantinople_

The story of the introduction of coffee into Constantinople shows that
it experienced m